Land of the Burning Sands (29 page)

“Lady Tehre,” Meierin said, in that patient tone that meant Tehre had forgotten something. Tehre blinked at her. The girl said, “Lord Bertaud wanted to show you…” and her voice trailed off as Tehre exclaimed in dismay.

She turned to the Feierabianden lord. “I always distract,” she said apologetically. “Please forgive.” She concentrated on her Terheien and asked carefully, “What do you have?”

Lord Bertaud showed her the small map he had brought, turning it so Tehre could see it. “Where?” he wondered.

Tehre leaned forward, studying the map with interest. It wasn’t detailed enough to show the little roads around Breidechboden; it showed only the great cities and largest towns. And the river, of course, for it was the Teschanken that gave life and prosperity to southern Casmantium.

Tehre braced a hand on the seat against the mild jolting of the carriage. “Here,” she explained, showing the foreign lord their approximate location. “We go here. This way. Around to the north, to the river road. Then to Dachsichten.”

“Dachsichten,” repeated Lord Bertaud, trying out the name. His tongue gave it a strange, soft pronunciation, more like “Dashenten.” He looked at Tehre, eyebrows rising, half smiling at his own incorrect pronunciation.

“Dachsichten,” Tehre told him, enunciating the name slowly and carefully, emphasizing the breaks in the word. “Dachsichten.” Impatient with leaning awkwardly forward, she moved to sit next to the foreigner, bending to avoid knocking her head into the low roof of the carriage and catching awkwardly at the window as the vehicle jolted.

Lord Bertaud, eyebrows lifting with surprise, nevertheless caught her hand to steady her as she changed seats.

She dropped onto the seat next to him and began to point out the towns on the map, starting in the southwest of Casmantium and working her way east and north. She pronounced each one carefully and slowly, pausing to let Lord Bertaud try each word before she went on to the next. “Ruchen. Abreichan. Weierachboden. Wanenboden. Breidechboden. Dachsichten. Geierand—that is, mmm, close? Close to Terheien, yes?”

“Yes,” Lord Bertaud agreed, looking grateful that one of the names, at least, came easily to his tongue. “The rest, no.” He shook his head in rueful dismay over the other names. “So hard to say! There should be a way to learn easy. More easy?”

“More easily,” Tehre told him, and wondered whether, if one treated words as materials and languages as mechanisms… and syntax as joints… hmm. When constructing a mechanism, the trick was to see it, hold it whole in the mind while one’s hands worked with the materials. The maker’s clear and focused intention was what set quality into a made thing. What would the equivalent of that focused intention be if one was working with something intangible like language? She asked suddenly, “Feierabianden places? Names?”

Lord Bertaud gave her a puzzled look.

“Give—say—Feierabianden names?” Tehre wondered how she could put her request more clearly, but after a moment, he seemed to decipher her meaning.

“Terabiand,” he said obediently. “Bered, Talend, Nejeied, Sepes, Niambe, Sierhanan, Sihannas, Annand, Tamiaon—”

Tehre held up her hand, stopping his recital so she could think. Words and syntax, yes, but also something else. She didn’t quite mean “pronunciation.” Style, one might say. Like the style of the palace in Breidechboden, all massive stonework and flying buttresses and architraves, those last built stubbornly straight although anyone could see they would crack; that aggressive, heavy style was entirely different from the graceful and modest wooden buildings of the forested north. Hmm. Words and syntax and style… One would not express these abstractions with mathematical equations, but perhaps one might find a way to express the components of a language in some relatively precise way. Hmm…

Tehre blinked back to awareness of the carriage with Meierin touching her hand, and realized they were no longer moving. They had stopped. She gave the girl a raised-eyebrow look of inquiry.

“There is a farmhouse here,” Meierin explained, not quite hiding a smile. “It is after noon? You must want something to eat?” It was plain Meierin had received firm instructions from Fareine about feeding Tehre.

“There is a house here where they sell food,” added Lord Bertaud, sounding a little apologetic about it. “If you wish, we stop here for a little while?”

His inflection suggested that this halt was up to Tehre, that they might simply go on if she preferred, but after all, it was his carriage. Besides, now that she thought of it, Tehre
was
hungry. She allowed Lord Bertaud to help her and then Meierin out of the carriage, turning to gaze curiously at the farmhouse with its trestle tables and long benches. Clearly a lot of travelers passed this way, and the farmer—or his wife—had decided to make the most of the convenient road that ran so close to their house. Theirs was not the only carriage that had stopped here for a midday break. The tables were already loaded with dishes, drawing in travelers with enticing smells of roasting meat and baking bread.

“Did you pay the women here?” she asked Lord Bertaud.

“You are my, ah, my…”

Guests
, Tehre presumed he meant. “Not at all,” she corrected him. “I am glad to travel in, ah, in your protect, Lord Bertaud, but you are
my
guest.” She shifted gratefully back to Prechen. “Meierin, pay the woman. Remember the honor of my family and be generous.” There
had
to be a better way to learn a language than all that fumbling for half-known words… She wandered toward the table, wondering if there was roasted chicken.

There was roasted chicken. And beef pies. And eggs baked in pastry. No wonder so many people stopped here. Tehre nibbled thoughtfully at a bit of chicken, set her plate aside, and said to Lord Bertaud, “Say for me a, mmm, a story. Yes?”

The foreigner smiled uncertainly. “A story?”

“Of your travel? Or a story for children? Any story. Say first in Prechen and then in Terheien. Yes? Please?”

Lord Bertaud tilted his head, still uncertain and also curious. “Same story? In Prechen and Terheien?” Smiling, he made a comment in Terheien that was too quick for Tehre to catch but was probably something like, “
Well, I suppose we both need the practice, don’t we?
”

He told a children’s story about three foxes and a rabbit. He told each bit of it first in flowing, graceful Terheien and then in halting Prechen. The story took the rest of the midday break and a little longer than they had probably meant to stop, but Lord Bertaud was too easy-natured to break off once the farmwife’s children and several of the travelers drifted over to listen.

“But the third fox wasn’t clever, really,” protested one of the children after the story ended. “He was just lucky. The rabbit was the clever one, really.”

“The rabbit was a little too clever for her own good, don’t you think? Like quite a number of little rabbits,” said her father, a carter, smiling. He gave Lord Bertaud a little bow, swinging his daughter up to his broad shoulder to carry her back to his cart. “Thank you, honored sir. Well told, may I say so?”

Tehre barely heard the other travelers murmur similar comments. She was trying to frame words in her mind, as she might have placed bricks in a wall or stitches in a tapestry. They were harder to work with than bricks or thread. Or perhaps it was the nebulous nature of the framework into which she was attempting to set them.

She was not really aware of re-entering the carriage or of the jolt and sway as they turned back onto the road. After a time, Meierin said something she didn’t pay any attention to. Finally Lord Bertaud leaned forward and said questioningly, “Lady Tehre?”

Him, Tehre noticed. He had all of Terheien ready on his tongue and in his mind: a river of words, an
ocean
of language. She could feel it in him, almost as though it had physical weight and was drawn by powerful tides. Tehre offered him her hand.

He took it, a little hesitantly. Tehre closed both her own small hands firmly around his broad one, and built a great wall between them. She built it of words, Terheien on his side and Prechen on hers. She defined the wall as a dam between one language and the other. Then she opened a sluice gate in the dam and locked it in place. Then she opened her eyes—realizing for the first time that she’d closed them—let her breath out, and said ruefully, “The hard part is that you have to get the whole thing in place at once, don’t you, or it won’t hold at all, and you have to put in the sluice at the same exact time you’re building the dam or you won’t get it in right. I think I got it right.
Did
I get it right?” She looked inquiringly at Lord Bertaud.

He was staring at her, astonished. “You—what did you do?”

“Am I speaking Terheien?”

“Yes!”

“Then I did get it right.” Satisfied, Tehre glanced around for writing materials. Then, frustrated, she sighed and cast her hands upward. “Meierin, this is so provoking! Will you remember to find some quills and paper? I know I won’t remember. Oh, I beg your pardon, am I still speaking in Terheien? Here, let me…” She built a language sluice for the girl as well. It was easier this time because she could use the wall she’d already made, but she longed for a quill and paper to help organize her ideas about the building of insubstantial structures. Hadn’t Brugent Wareierchen said something about mathematics being a kind of making? Was that at all the same as language being a making?

Gereint would know—she wished Gereint was here; she wished she could show him what she’d made and find out what he thought about it—maybe he could think of a way to make it more generalizable… or get around the problem of needing somebody to hold each language in place on either side of the wall… It would be nice if you didn’t actually have to have someone who knew Terheien at hand in order to build this sort of structure, but at the moment she couldn’t see any way around that… She said, “Make a note, Meierin, would you? I want to look up what Wareierchen said about law and magic, and whether he said anything about language as an abstract making when he was writing about law. I can look that up in my father’s library. Don’t let me forget about that.”

Meierin nodded, her eyes still wide and stunned. “Are you—are you speaking in Terheien?” She turned to Lord Bertaud. “Honored lord, is she—
is
my lady speaking in, in Terheien?”

“You are both speaking Terheien,” the lord said, shaking his head. He didn’t glare at Tehre, exactly, but clearly he wanted to. “Am I speaking Prechen?”

Tehre was embarrassed. “If we all keep forgetting which language we’re speaking, I’ll try to think of a way to make it easier, but I think an ability to keep track will come with practice.”

“Lady Tehre—” The Feierabianden stopped, shook his head again, and said, “I believed you to be a maker. But I think, esteemed lady, you must instead be a mage? I did not realize—”

“I’m not precisely a mage,” Tehre said, surprised. “It’s just as well: Mages are so impractical, you know.” Then she wondered which language she was speaking and concentrated on listening to the sound of her own words. She went on slowly, barely paying attention to what she was actually saying: “And they sacrifice so much of their natural character as they develop their magecraft, don’t they?” She was still speaking Terheien. She repeated the sentence in Prechen, carefully. She tried, experimentally, to mentally order a lecture on the sort of stresses that fracture wood as opposed to steel, concentrating on the shape of her sentences… In fact, the way she framed ideas seemed to shift a little depending on which language she let come to her tongue. That was unexpected. She should try poetry. That should offer interesting insights about the nature of language. “Lord Bertaud, do you know any poetry?”

“I’m frightened to admit to any knowledge of anything whatsoever,” murmured the foreigner, his eyebrows rising. “Esteemed mage, I don’t understand how you did this, but I—”

Tehre shook her head quickly. “I’m not a mage, truly. Haven’t you been listening? A mage is a… a focal point for power, you know? Or so Warichteier says, and I suppose he’s right, he is about most things, I believe. I’m not like that.”

Lord Bertaud raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t you? I suppose a Casmantian maker understands the difference between making and magecraft…” But his tone was faintly doubtful.

Tehre shrugged impatiently. “I just think about things. Though I didn’t know I… I’ve never actually thought about language before. It’s interesting what you can do, isn’t it, if you think about language the right way?” She considered pronunciation. “I suppose… No, that doesn’t make sense. Or maybe… no. Hmm.” Perhaps pronunciation had to do with capturing the style of a language… “I
do
wish I had a proper quill and some paper,” she said, with sudden, intense impatience. “I can’t think properly without a decent quill in my hand.”

“I will find for you the very best paper and quills available in Dachsichten,” Lord Bertaud promised her. “If you wish me to tell you another story, lady, believe me, you have only to ask.”

Tehre laughed. But she hoped he remembered his promise to find writing materials. Or that Meierin did. She already knew she would probably be distracted somehow and forget.

In the event, Tehre was indeed distracted from any possible concerns about feather quills and good paper long before they arrived at Dachsichten. Because that very evening, they saw their first griffin.

The griffin was flying fast, low above the river, heading south. They saw it shortly before dusk, after they had stopped for the evening. No inn being convenient, they had simply camped beside the river, though with the supplies Lord Bertaud’s retainers carried, this did not present much hardship. The campsite was a pretty one; three other parties had stopped in it as well, so there were tents scattered like a field of red and blue flowers all across the campsite. Lord Bertaud had set up his tents so they overlooked the river.